Isn't it time to open your arms to Christ's grace?

I wasn’t very good about doing chores as a kid. Or good at all. My mom tried incentive charts, and they would work for a few days, but then I’d lose interest.

One thing I was always forgetting to do was laundry. One day my mom, frustrated that I never put away my own laundry, laid it in a heap on my bed. That worked. I had to fold the laundry and take it to my closet so I could lay down in my bed.

Well, it worked that time, anyway.

It didn’t take long for me to think this through: laundry was cloth and my bed linens were cloth: Why couldn’t they co-inhabit the same space, kinda like the owls and the howler monkeys in a happy rainforest?

Yes, I actually slept in my bed that night with the laundry on my bed.

I remember my mom coming to wake me up in the morning and saying something like, “You didn’t honestly sleep with that laundry on your bed, did you?”

Well, it was kinda hard to deny.

The more my mom tried to get me to care about the laundry, the more indifferent I grew, even to the point that I got used to sleeping with laundry on my bed.

I probably owe my mom about 5,000 loads of laundry.

. . . . .

We get so used to avoiding God.

We build up a higher and higher resistance against His voice. We tolerant higher and higher levels of guilt. We ignore greater and greater signs that He loves us and is calling us to be His children.

And one day, most of the world will wake up and discover the chance to love God is gone.

No one will then deny that God gave us all the opportunity to follow Him, not when we see how He has been calling us.

And none of us will be able to pay back the debt of sin we owe for what we didn’t do and should have, or did do and shouldn’t have.

Boy, that’s bad news.

But we don’t have to live in resistance right now. If you can read this, then you still have the chance to turn to Him.

The good news is, the chance to love God is not based on how many things we do right or haven’t done wrong. My mom’s love (very fortunately) never was based on how many loads of laundry I did. Her love for me is based just on the fact that I’m her child.

That’s how God wants to treat us! Jesus came to pay for our sin so we could be adopted as children of God. The Bible tells us that sin doesn’t have any power to keep a child of God out of Heaven, because Jesus pays for all sin. God’s Spirit guides us to live holy lives once we belong to Him!

If you’re not a child of God, that’s where you’ve got to start. And if you are a child of God, don’t be like me with my mom and the laundry. I don’t want to win the Laziest Child Award when I get to Heaven. God has been more merciful in my life than I can wrap my mind around–I don’t want to disgrace Him by continually behaving as the prodigal. I don’t want to build up a resistance to His Words of warning or an immunity to His call.

I want to serve Him with everything I am . . without any resistance at all.

Make sure that your own hearts are not evil and unbelieving, turning you away from the living God.You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God.For if we are faithful to the end, trusting God just as firmly as when we first believed, we will share in all that belongs to Christ.Remember what it says: